Reparations
by Wojciechowski
Summary: Following the events of Captain America: Civil War, Bucky Barnes is forced to come to terms with the world, and himself.
1. Chapter 1

A deep, soothing voice directly overhead startled him into a panic. The buzzing in his head grew louder, as it always did whenever the empty spaces in his mind forced him to succumb to blind terror, ringing through his skull and drowning out any flow of rational thought. He had no idea where he was. He couldn't move. He couldn't open his eyes. His lungs were in no shape to compensate for the ever-increasing rapidity of his heartbeat, and the resulting lack of oxygen delivered to his brain threatened to once more take away his consciousness. _Please do,_ he begged it. _Just let me go back to sleep_.

The voice spoke again. "James, it's all right. Focus on my voice: you need to slow your heart rate. The anesthetics still need some time to wear off. You should start to regain mobility in the next few minutes."

James? Nobody called him James. Nobody had called him James—except for schoolteachers and drill sergeants—ever since his best friend had turned the scathing playground taunt into a term of endearment. He tried to say it out loud, "My name is Bucky," but a couple of feeble yet indignant grunts were all he could manage.

The voice chuckled softly. "Have patience. You'll get your fair share of talking, I assure you."

Resigned to do nothing but wait, his head began to clear. The buzzing subsided, and everything came flooding back to him: the U.N. bombing, Bucharest, Helmut Zemo, Siberia, Tony Stark, Steve… All the reasons he had decided to go back under ice. Automatically he shut off all emotion. None of that mattered any more; it existed only in the past, and therefore was of no consequence. Besides, he had no idea how long he had been frozen. For all he knew, Steve Rogers might be dead by now, and the world an entirely different place from when he had seen it last. That was something to look forward to—a new world meant new problems, and accepting new problems meant letting go of the old ones. It had become almost second nature for him to cut off his feelings in this way. Arnim Zola would have been proud of how well he had learned that skill.

At last the anesthetics relinquished their hold on him. Before opening his eyes, Bucky asked: "How long has it been?"

"You have been asleep for nearly fifteen days."

The buzzing began to return. "Great."

"You sound disappointed."

"No, I—I just…" He didn't know what to say: he was disappointed. "So—Hydra can't control me any more?" If they had woken him up already, at least that must have been accomplished.

A short pause. "You are perfectly safe here."

"You didn't answer the question."

Again, the voice didn't respond right away. Bucky heard it take a cautious breath, and he opened his eyes before it spoke again. Staring at the shiny, metallic ceiling of his Wakandan safe house, he finally received an answer.

"Technically, Hydra's programming is still there."

" _Technically?_ Then why the hell did you wake me up?" Now thoroughly pissed off, he hauled himself up to a sitting position and, spinning around to glare at whomever he had been talking to, found himself face to face with King T'challa. That sparked another nerve. "Change your mind about deciding to help me?"

T'challa didn't even blink, but held his gaze with calm intensity. "To the contrary, I decided to wake you up because it is the only way that anyone can help you. You cannot expect to sleep peacefully in a corner while you wait for other people to solve your problems. Whether we find a way to break Hydra's coding or not, you need to find a way to return to the world. You need to learn how to live your own life again."

For a moment Bucky was lost in T'challa's gaze, which was the definitive opposite of Steve's. Steve's blue eyes, bright and trusting almost to the point of naivety, always seemed to be reaching out or asking for something, while the pair before him now were dark and deep, taking in the world one detail at a time. What with the warm steadiness of those eyes, as well as the hypnotic pulsing of his own blood through his veins, he felt he could have sat there forever. _Shut up_ , he caught himself at last. _Stop it. You're being stupid._

A strange sensation in his left arm—the fact that he had a left arm—called him back to his senses and provided an adequate distraction to break his gaze. This new arm was very nearly a work of art: shiny and powerful, it was the product of expert engineering, and felt almost like a natural part of his body. Its response was precise to a micrometer, with flawless mobility at the joints. Even the nerve-endings in his shoulder were connected properly, and that was something Hydra had never been able to figure out.

T'challa grinned. "Do you like it?"

"It's amazing. Is this made out of—"

"Vibranium, yes."

"I don't understand. Why?"

"Vibranium is the strongest metal on Earth, and Wakanda is home to one of its largest deposits. It was obviously the best option."

"No, I mean—why are you—why—all this—?" After so many years without a single decent conversation with anyone, Bucky found it difficult to put the words together. Thankfully, T'challa understood.

"Human decency, no? Why wouldn't I do all this?"

"Well, you did kinda try to kill me about four times."

"I disagree. I tried to kill you three times."

"No, I distinctly remember four different occasions: the rooftop, the underpass, the—"

"The rooftop and the underpass only count as one; they took place in the same city, on the same day and for the same reason."

"Fine. Three times."

An electronic alarm dinged. T'challa glanced at his watch and stood up. "I must go. There is a room made up for you, at the end of that hallway. You also have a kitchen, a gym, doctors on call at any time, a library, computer facilities—everything you might need. I will visit again as soon as I am able." He began making his way toward the door.

"Hey! You never answered my question."

Pausing for just a moment, T'challa turned back to him with a small smile. "What can I say? I missed you."


	2. Chapter 2

Bucky didn't know what to do with himself. Over the course of four days, he had eaten nothing but a can of baked beans—cold, because he couldn't find anything in the kitchen that looked like a stove and couldn't figure out how to work the microwave. After learning from an English dictionary he had found in the library that a microwave could be used to cook food, he had spent a good forty minutes just staring at the thing before ultimately giving up out of frustration. He couldn't understand it. He couldn't understand why he couldn't understand it. Somewhere his brain had hit an invisible wall. Somehow he was able to pilot virtually any moving vehicle imaginable, but still couldn't work out how to operate a goddamn microwave. His abilities allowed him to wield with expertise any instrument of death, yet drew a complete blank when it came to ordinary, everyday functions that did not involve killing anyone. In other words, T'challa was right: he didn't know how to live—hell, he didn't know how to exist—of his own accord any more.

With that realization, he stopped trying to. The next few days passed by in a blur. He didn't eat anything; he barely slept; he couldn't remember what had happened from one hour to the next—mainly because nothing had happened. There was nothing in his head—nothing except the memories, replaying over and over again like a broken record. First came all those faces, the images of every person he had killed. There were so many of them. And even though Hydra had wiped his memory after each mission, even though he had never known who half of them were, still Bucky remembered every single one.

Then he was sixteen again; and there was Steve. _Shit_. The more he tried to block this vision out, the sharper it became. One night. That was all it was, and afterward Steve pretended that none of it had happened. Never once did he so much as acknowledge it, not even to ensure that it would never happen again. Did he still remember that night, Bucky wondered? If he did, it clearly didn't mean anything to him. It didn't prevent him from kissing Sharon Carter right then and there in front of him, leaving Bucky nothing to do but grin through the pain.

And what was, if possible, even worse, was that Steve didn't trust him any more. Not only that, but he couldn't trust him any more; and Bucky couldn't blame him for it. For a moment, he thought of how everything used to be—before Hydra, before Captain America, when there was only the two of them. When there was only James Barnes never failing to look out for puny little Steve Rogers, who somehow always managed to get into trouble. Though he would never have admitted it, Steve knew that Bucky would always be there; that, somehow or other, Bucky would always find a way to show up at the last minute and save his skin, and he had counted on it with his life. Bucky used to be able to see that whenever Steve looked at him.

Now all of that was gone. When Steve looked at him now, there was a guarded coldness, a distance that spanned seventy-five years and carried none of the trust that used to be so prevalent. This alone was worse than Sharon Carter, worse than all of Steve's ignorance and all those casual double dates that made Bucky want to jump into the river. Steve no longer saw him as a friend. All he was now was a problem. He was a problem that Captain America didn't have the time to deal with any more.

Bucky noticed a dull pain in his stomach. Fuck. That meant he was hungry, didn't it? That was annoying. He wanted it to go away. But the only option was returning to the kitchen to find food. The pain didn't bother him that much, he decided. He would much rather just sit here.


End file.
